B000FC0U8A EBOK (11 page)

Did you catch anything today? After I saw you?

Got a few. I let them go.

My dad got hired at the ironworks. He designs the hulls of ships.

Is that right?

Well, he will. He will do that.

He holds her hand and her palm is damp with sweat but she holds on and they lock fingers and she can feel his strong hand, rough fingertips. They sit like that a bit and she sits as still as she
can. They do not talk. The fire sends smoke high into the trees. The stars wink and gutter. It feels nice being the daughter of a shipbuilder.

Later he tries to kiss her. Leans across clumsily and his breath is hot on her chin and she clamps her eyes shut. She thinks of her mother, her tiny mother under onions in a train car. She pulls away from the boy, stands and hurries home, head down, through the low-bending pines. She climbs through her bedroom window. Takes off her wet sneakers, hangs her brown cardigan. Listens for the ocean. Thinks of eyes like green medicine. She boils inside.

In the morning she drags her mother to the sea by the wrist. To confront her with the sea dressed in fog. To show her that this place is not empty. Wings of mist drag through the treetops. The fog shreds everywhere; flashes of pure blue wink above. The sea undressing. A wide-brimmed hat crammed over her mother’s hair. Gulls turn in a high noisy wheel above the gliding tide. Cormorants dive for breakfast.

They stand on the rocks. Dorotea studies her mother, searches her face for signs of change. Of awakening. Dorotea holds her breath. Counts to twenty. Her mother stands closed and rigid.

Mentiras, her mother says. Your father doesn’t know a thing about ships. He worked as a janitor all his life. He lied to everybody. Even himself. He’ll be fired today, or tomorrow.

No, Mama. Daddy’s smart. He’ll find a way. He’ll learn as he goes. He has to. He saw a chance and took it. We’ll make it. Lookit how nice it is. Lookit this place.

Life can turn out a million ways, Dorotea. Her mother speaks English like she is spitting rocks. But the one way life will not turn out is the way you dream it. You can dream anything, but it’s never what will be. It’s never the way it is. The only thing that can’t come true is your dream. Everything else . . .

She shuts her mouth, shrugs.

Dorotea looks at her wet sneakers. The leather is coming apart. She clambers down the steep rocks, grabs hold of weed for balance. Plunges her hand into the mud beneath the water. Holds it up.

Lookit, Mama. Lookit all the things that live here. In just one handful.

Mother squints at her daughter. Her daughter holding ocean mud to the sky like some offering.

And then through the mist a green canoe glides. A lone fisherman, paddling, his rod across the stern. A fisherman with a white necklace on his throat.

The boy stops in mid-paddle. His oar drips. He studies the two figures on the rocks, the thin and brittle mother with a hand on her hat like she is holding herself to the rock. And the girl, wet to her waist, holding up part of the sea.

He raises his hand. Smiles. Shouts Dorotea’s name.

They sell fishing gear in the back of the hardware store in Bath. A giant with a beard and huge round knees sits on a stool tying leaders. Her father looks up at the rack of fishing rods, thumbs up his glasses.

The giant says, I help you folks?

My daughter here would like a fishing pole.

The giant reaches into a cupboard, pulls out a Zebco all-in-one spinning kit. Hands it to Dorotea, says, This’ll be perfect for just about anything you’d ever need. Comes with spinners and everything.

Dorotea holds the package at arm’s length, studies the reel, the blunt two-piece rod. Chrome-plated guides. The plastic wrap. On the tag a cartoon bass curls out of a cartoon pond to devour a treble-hooked lure. Her dad puts his hand on her head, asks Dorotea how she likes the looks of it.

She doesn’t like the looks of it at all: it’s blunt, clumsy-looking. No coils of fly line. No elegance. She imagines chunks of flesh glommed on her hook, her reel rusting, the boy laughing at her.

Daddy, she says. I want a fly rod. This is for bait-fishermen.

The giant roars. Her father rubs his jaw.

The giant rings up Dorotea’s fly rod on a black cash register. His huge fingers count change.

Don’t know a single girl that fly-fishes, the giant says. Never heard of girls fly-fishing, really. He says it kindly. Eyes on Dorotea. Fingers like fat pink cigars.

I’ve flung a fly myself, he continues. I’m still learning it. I suppose we’re all still learning. You learn and learn and then you die and you haven’t learned half of it.

He shrugs his hilly shoulders, hands her father change.

You’re new here. He talks only to Dorotea.

We just moved to Harpswell, she says. Daddy’s working at Bath Iron Works. He designs ships. It was his first day today.

The giant nods, glances down at her father. Her father’s hands open, close.

We lived in Ohio, he mutters. I did hullwork on lake freighters. Thought we’d come up here, give it a shot. A man only gets so many chances is what I figure.

The giant offers another shrug. Smiles. Says to Dorotea, Maybe we could fish together sometime. We could try down by Popham Beach. They been getting into some nice cows down there. Schoolies race the shallows at slack tide. Get one of those on your little rod there and look out.

The giant smiles, sits back on his stool. Dorotea and her father leave the store, drive past the ironworks, the shipyard and the vast iron warehouses, a high chain-link fence, cranes swinging, a green-hulled tug at dry dock dripping rust. From the top of Mill
Street Dorotea can see the Kennebec River rolling heavily into the Atlantic.

In the evening Dorotea sits on her sleeping bag and fits her rod together. Two pieces join together, screw on the plastic reel, feed fly line through the guides. Tie on a leader.

Her dad in the door frame.

You like the rod, Dorotea?

It’s beautiful, Daddy. Thank you.

You going to fish in the morning?

In the morning.

Your mother say anything?

Dorotea shakes her head. She thinks he will say more but he doesn’t.

After he leaves she holds her breath, takes her new fly rod, and climbs out her window. She walks beneath the dark pines, feels her way in the moonless night. She reaches the firelight, hears a guitar and singing, sees the boy on his log. She crouches under the pines and watches. Thinks of her father saying a man only gets so many chances. Puts her hand in her pocket. Feels the three streamers there, their hook points, their feathers. She shuts her eyes. Her hands shake. A hook pricks her finger.

She stands, balks, turns around, walks to her left, to the ocean. She clambers over rocks, shadows among shadows. Stands at the sea’s fringe, sucks a drop of blood from her fingertip. She has the shakes. Holds her breath to fight them.

She holds the air in her lungs and stands very still and listens. The silence of Harpswell rises up in her ear like a wave and breaks into a rainbow of tiny sounds: an owl calling, the faint sound of laughter at the bonfire, the pines creaking, cicadas screeching, resting, screeching. Rodents rustling in blackberry brambles. Pebbles clinking. Leaves shifting. Even clouds marching. And
beneath, the murmuring sea benched in fog. This is indeed a full world, Dorotea. It overspills. She breathes, tastes the salty ocean cycle of rot and birth. Takes up her rod and feeds the line clumsily through the guides. Whips it behind her. It snags on something. She turns.

The boy is there. His fingertips on her shoulders, the sleeves of her cardigan. His eyes on hers.

Her mother stands in Dorotea’s room in the dark. Her hands on her hips like she is trying to crush her own pelvis. Her black shoes planted firmly. Dorotea straddles the window frame, one leg in, one out. Her fly rod half into her room. Her dew-soaked sneaker stuck all over with pine needles.

I thought I told you not to see that boy.

What boy?

Who called you Dorothy.

The boy in the canoe?

You know what boy.

You
don’t. You don’t know him. I don’t either.

Her mother stares. Her body quakes, tendons in her throat stand out. Dorotea holds her breath. Holds it so long she feels sick.

I wasn’t with him, Mama. I was fishing. Or trying to. I got a terrible tangle in my line. I wasn’t with him.

Pescador. Pescadora.

I went out fishing.

From then on Dorotea is imprisoned after dark. Her mother does it herself: she screws long bolts into Dorotea’s window, hammers it shut. Dorotea’s door locked at night. She stares at her maps.

The summer rolls forward in silence. The rented house
cramped and creaky. Every day her father leaves at dawn, comes home late. Dinners are eaten silently. Her mother’s face retreats inside itself like a poked sea anemone. Silverware clinking, a platter on the table. Beans with the life boiled out of them. Tortillas wrung dry. Please pass the peppers, Mama. The house creaks. The pines whisper. I went fishing today, Daddy. Found a lobster claw long as my foot. Really.

Dorotea leaves the house just after her father does and she stays out all day. Fishing. Telling herself she is fishing and not looking for the boy. She tramps all the way to South Harpswell, muddy-ankled, walking the sea edge, turning over shells, jabbing anemones with sticks, learning the tiny tricks of shore life. Don’t squeeze a sea cucumber. Scallop shells break easily. Stone crabs hide under driftwood. Check periwinkles for hermit crabs. Snails stay tucked inside murex shells. Stepping on horseshoe crabs doesn’t do anybody any good. Barnacles are good traction. From a hundred feet up a cormorant can hear you split open a sea clam and will turn and dive and land and beg for it. The sea, Dorotea learns, blooms. She learns and relearns it.

But mostly she fishes. Learning the knots, catching a barbed streamer in her hair, crouching on driftwood to pull out wind-knots or undo massive tangles of leader. Gets her line caught on brambles, on branches, one time on a floating detergent bottle. Learns to walk with her rod, guide it through brush, over rocks. Didn’t even know she needed a tippet. The cork handle on her rod goes dark with salt and sweat. Her brown shoulders go the color of old pennies. Her sneakers rot off her feet. She walks the sea’s edge barefoot, head up. This new Dorotea. This seaside Dorothy.

She catches nothing. She tries Popham Beach, the long faded spit of sand there, the estuary at ebb tide, at slack tide. She casts from rocky points, from a wooden dock; she wades to her neck and casts. And nothing. Sees men in boats haul in twenty, thirty stripers. Beautiful striped bass with charcoal stripes and translucent mouths gasping. And nothing for her own streamer hooks but
greenweed or flotsam. And those awful tangles of leader; line wraps itself around her ankles; knots from nowhere spoil her tippets.

Never a sign of the boy.

She sees fish out of the water, sturgeon leaping. Sees the ocean violence. Sees a pack of bluefish snarl out of a wave, curl through a panicked cloud of herring, drive half-bitten, quivering smelt onto the sand. Sees a dead cod turn over white and fat in the swash. Sees a tide-beached skate picked apart by gannets, an osprey pluck a whiting from a wavetop.

One noon she hikes to where they light the bonfires. The sky is gray and low, skimming the treetops. Rain plunks slow and warm. The fire pit black and wet and flat. Beer bottles rolled up against logs, standing on stumps. She walks out to the point, takes off her sweater, wades into the sea. Waves lap at her neck. Her hair floats beside her. She thinks of the boy, his hot breath. His rough fingertips. Those green eyes gone black in the dark.

Daylong she talks to no one. Each time she rounds a bend, she prays the boy will be there, enwombed in fog, casting, casting for fish, casting for her. But there is only rock and weed and sometimes boats trolling downriver.

A July night arrives, hangs heavier and wetter than any night Dorotea can remember. The air heavy all day, waiting for a storm that won’t begin. The ocean pewter and flat. The horizon erased in a smear of gray and the sky hung so low it seems to rest on top of the rented house; any moment it might collapse the roof. Night comes but does not break the heat.

Dorotea sits in her bedroom and sweats. She feels the sky threatening to bury her.

Her father stands in the door frame. Sweat circles under his arms. He used to get those when he mopped floors. Her dad the shipbuilder.

Hiya Dorotea.

Daddy it’s hot.

Only thing for it is to wait.

Can’t we get her to open the window? Just for tonight. I’ll never sleep. I’m sweating through my sleeping bag.

I don’t know, Dorotea.

Please, Daddy. It’s so hot.

Maybe we could leave the door open.

The window, Daddy. Mama’s asleep. She’ll never know. Just for tonight.

Her father breathes. His shoulders slumped, rounded. Comes back with a screwdriver. Quietly unbolts the window, pries the nails loose.

The boy is not there.

Dorotea sweats outside the firelight. Pine needles stick to her knees. Mosquitoes loop, alight, bite. She smears them on her skin. The smoke from the bonfire rises into a windless sky. She holds her breath so long that her eyes lose focus and her chest stings. She goes over the soft smeary faces once more, orange firelit kids around a bonfire on Harpswell Point. His face is not among them. He is nowhere.

She walks around to the point, a place she has learned so well, the small and secret coves, a deep pool where she saw a white lobster one morning. All the secrets she feels she owes to him. She knows she will see him there, fishing and laughing that she wore her sweater on the hottest night ever. He will be there and he will show her things about the sea. He will lift this cargo that has settled on her.

He is not on the point either.

She goes back to the bonfire, walks right to it, this fourteen-year-old girl wound up and strong. The Harpswell kids stare at
her. She feels the heat of it. Smoke rolls into her eyes. She says the boy’s name.